Reprogrammable Optical Logic Circuit Using Opto-Electro-Mechanical Device

The advances in silicon photonics allow the applications of optical devices in on-chip functional computations. Several works on the development of synthesis and design methods for optical logic circuits have been performed, where, the circuits are composed of optical devices such as semiconductor optical amplifier based Mach–Zehnder Interferometer, electrically controlled Mach–Zehnder Interferometer. These optical devices may not allow compact and efficient realizations of large-scale optical circuits. Besides that, all the existing approaches suffer from unsatisfactory realizations and restricted flexibility. In fact, large number of splitting of optical signals, waveguide crossing and bending are the reasons for which the outputs of the optical circuits degrade. To solve these issues, one solution is an optical circuit structure which can be reprogrammable to realize arbitrary Boolean functions, while at the same time, making the physical realizations practical. To this end, one can utilize a recently developed optical device based on opto-electro-mechanical effect which enables smaller footprint, low optical loss and rapid switching. Using this device, a reprogrammable optical circuit structure can be designed which is a $$\left( {2^{n} \times 1} \right)$$ optical multiplexer composed of several $$\left( {2 \times 1} \right)$$ optical multiplexers. Experimental evaluations confirm the efficacy of the proposed approach over an existing approach.